I've always found the idea of the Post-Apocalyptic origin cool, but it ends up feeling rather bland in practice. Since all the origin provides is the survivor trait (+70% habitability on tomb worlds, +10 leader lifespan), the relative rarity of tomb worlds in the galaxy result in most PA games playing out similarly to a Galactic Doorstep or Prosperous Unification game (minus the extra benefits of PU). +10 leader lifespan, a different visual aesthetic for your homeworld, and the occasional ability to colonize an extra world or two early rather than waiting for a late game terraforming tech isn't very exciting, in my humble opinion.
I'd personally much rather that the PA origin provided a gameplay experience that was noticeably different from what other origins offer the player. For a long time, I've thought there was a pretty simple solution to this, so I wanted to make a post about it and see what others think.
I would suggest that, rather than giving the survivor trait, the Post-Apocalyptic origin replaces the normal climate preference for a species with the tomb world climate preference (80% habitability on tomb worlds, 60% habitability on all 9 regular planet climates) that is already used for some primitive & event generated species. This would make a PA origin empire something of a "jack of all trades, master of none" species in terms of colonizing. I think it would also be perfectly reasonable to have the origin come with non-tomb world guaranteed habitables (only your homeworld was consumed by nuclear fire, after all).
Having true tomb world climate preference would allow an empire to get better value out of all the planets in its empire earlier in the game (since it would encounter few, if any, red climate planets), but would struggle to find any green climate planets. It would (I think) also be unable to use terraforming to improve habitability unless it takes the gaia world terraforming ascension perk.
I'm interested to hear any other thoughts / suggestions that people might have on this!
I'd personally much rather that the PA origin provided a gameplay experience that was noticeably different from what other origins offer the player. For a long time, I've thought there was a pretty simple solution to this, so I wanted to make a post about it and see what others think.
I would suggest that, rather than giving the survivor trait, the Post-Apocalyptic origin replaces the normal climate preference for a species with the tomb world climate preference (80% habitability on tomb worlds, 60% habitability on all 9 regular planet climates) that is already used for some primitive & event generated species. This would make a PA origin empire something of a "jack of all trades, master of none" species in terms of colonizing. I think it would also be perfectly reasonable to have the origin come with non-tomb world guaranteed habitables (only your homeworld was consumed by nuclear fire, after all).
Having true tomb world climate preference would allow an empire to get better value out of all the planets in its empire earlier in the game (since it would encounter few, if any, red climate planets), but would struggle to find any green climate planets. It would (I think) also be unable to use terraforming to improve habitability unless it takes the gaia world terraforming ascension perk.
I'm interested to hear any other thoughts / suggestions that people might have on this!
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